How to save rails generated pages to a file on the server

Rails
1

My show view of a data form is finished and now I want to give a
possibility to download this view as a pdf file.

I would like to use HTMLDOC to convert the html text to pdf. My idea:
save the html text to a temporary folder and run HTMLDOC.

But how can I save the html text to a file?

2

On Mar 19, 2010, at 11:43 AM, Fritz T. wrote:

My show view of a data form is finished and now I want to give a
possibility to download this view as a pdf file.

I would like to use HTMLDOC to convert the html text to pdf. My idea:
save the html text to a temporary folder and run HTMLDOC.

But how can I save the html text to a file?

render_to_string

That puts it into a local variable anyway… if you can then pass that
to htmldoc you’re on your way. Not sure how this might affect any
paths to CSS/images for HTMLDOC though.

3

Philip H. wrote:

render_to_string

ActionController::Base

That puts it into a local variable anyway… if you can then pass that
to htmldoc you’re on your way. Not sure how this might affect any
paths to CSS/images for HTMLDOC though.

Thanks. CSS is “no problem” with HTMLDOC - it doesn’t support it :wink:

Maybe, I need to find some alternative for HTMLDOC. My problem is, that
I have a table with variable number of columns.

4

Maybe, I need to find some alternative for HTMLDOC. My problem is,
that
I have a table with variable number of columns.

Prawn. #153 PDFs with Prawn - RailsCasts

5

You might want to check out:

http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/

wkhtmltopdf is free. prince will cost you. prince has better css
print-related implementation coverage at this time, but wkhtmltopdf
can be a very good alternative depending on the needs of your project.

Jeff

6

Prawn seems to need a fixed number of columns in tables, so I’ll take a
look on wkhtmltopdf.

7

Since I started using tools (like prince/wkhtmltopdf) to generate pdfs
from html/css for web app projects that need to gen pdfs, I’ve never
gone back to using low-level pdf-gen’ing libs/tools (like prawn).
Just requires so much less work.

By the way, you may also want to look into using

in combination with wkhtmltopdf(/prince) in case you need to do any
post-processing of your gen’d pdfs (adding additional watermarks,
splitting out pdf pages, combining pdfs, …).

Jeff